Episode 222 - Revisiting the Relationship Between Happiness and Pleasure
Date: 04/08/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3790-episode-222-revisiting-the-relationship-between-happiness-and-pleasure/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Special episode — pause from the De Finibus reading. Joshua is away for the total solar eclipse; Don joins in his place to explore the meaning of happiness and pleasure in Epicurean philosophy. Frame: just as a user who calls a database a “vault” (Obsidian) or a “graph” (Logseq) must learn that the same thing can carry different labels, confusion about the words happiness and pleasure has driven philosophical misunderstanding from Cicero’s day to our own.
Eudaimonia deep dive: Don explains the Greek word Epicurus uses where translators put “happiness” — literally “living under a good spirit,” carrying connotations of subjective well-being, fortune, and feeling that one’s life is going well. It is evaluative rather than merely emotional. Don’s preferred formulation: subjective well-being. Callistheni notes that the Greek word is useful precisely because it carries none of the advertising-tainted baggage of the English word happy; learning to sit with eudaimonia is worth the extra effort.
Central argument: Epicurus holds there are only two feelings — pleasure and pain — and no neutral third state (PD 3 cited). If you are not in pain, you are in pleasure; removing a pain leaves not a void but pleasure. This “major innovation of the new hedonism” (DeWitt, Epicurus and His Philosophy, p. 240) — applying the name pleasure to the normal pain-free state of living — is precisely what Cicero attacks and refuses to accept. Cicero persistently restricts “pleasure” to Cyrenaic-style sensory stimulation, while Epicurus’s definition embraces every experience of life that is not specifically painful.
Epicurus’s last day letter examined through the Greek: makarion (the word for blessed, the same word used for the gods in PD 1); chairon (kinetic pleasure word); and the verb meaning “to hold one’s ground in battle array against” — Epicurus used his joyful memories not to deny his pain but to fight it. Don: he was not claiming to feel no pain; he was using the pleasure of philosophical friendship as a weapon against the pain of kidney disease.
Closing: Don offers an eclipse metaphor — the Epicurean school shone brightly, was eclipsed for centuries, and we may be on the leading edge of the sun coming back out. Episode recorded the day before the 2024 total solar eclipse in the United States.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean text and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.
This week we’ll be pausing in our reading of Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends to take stock of recent conversations that we’ve had. Joshua is away from us this week viewing the total eclipse, but we have in his place our friend Don from the EpicureanFriends Forum. Don spent a lot of time looking into many aspects of the Latin and Greek words used by the ancient philosophers to discuss happiness and pleasure. And what we’re going to try to do today is to bring a high-level overview to some of the issues that Cicero and Torquatus have been sparring about in our episodes over the last many weeks, and let Don bring in some of his research into these words and see if we can bring some clarity to some of these issues.
As a way of introducing the topic for today, I had a story that I would like to relate. Over the years I’ve been interested in computers, and back even when the IBM PCs first came out I’ve been trying to use computers as a tool to improve my productivity. I remember people used to talk about storing their files on their computers in a particular way, and the term they often used at the time was that you’re going to save your files in a directory. At some point the word became folders — you’d save your material on your computer in folders, but it all meant the same thing. You were saving your files in a particular location on your computer. In more recent years people have branched off from those original terms, and in some of the more recent programs that I find useful in my knowledge management, there’s a program out there called Obsidian where you store notes. I use it in my Epicurean work, and when I first discovered that program, the people behind Obsidian call their data storage on a computer a vault. Okay, I can understand that — the word vault is pretty much the same thing as a folder or directory, and I got used to that terminology. The latest program I’ve started using is one called Logseq, but they call the place they store their data on the computer a graph, and I’ve had a lot of trouble even getting my mind wrapped around the idea that the data I’m storing on my computer is a graph as opposed to a set of files or a database. Most of these things we’re talking about are basically databases, but at any rate it’s been a real stumbling block for me when people come up with a word that seems unusual. Once you understand the word they’re using you can see that they’re talking about the same thing that you’re familiar with — but words can cause a lot of confusion and angst when somebody’s using a word in an unusual way that deviates from the normal usage.
And a lot of what we’re going to be discussing today is a similar issue. The meaning of words and how you use them has caused a lot of dispute in the discussion of Epicurean philosophy. Going back even to the beginning of Book Two of On Ends, where we started, Cicero says this:
Cassius: “So this rule is laid down by Plato in the Phaedrus, Epicurus gave his sanction, and declared that this proceeding should be observed in every debate. But the next step he did not see, for he pronounces against any definition of a subject being given, though without such it’s impossible sometimes to secure an understanding concerning the nature of the point at issue — as for instance in the case of the very matter we are now debating. Our inquiry touches the ultimate good. Can we learn what its nature is without agreeing among ourselves, when we use the phrase ‘ultimate good,’ what we mean by ultimate, and what we also mean by good itself? But this disclosure of matters which were, so to say, veiled — by which we reveal the essence of each thing, its definition — you actually adopted it occasionally unawares. For instance, you define this very ultimate or final or supreme good to be that standard whereby all right actions are judged, which is itself judged by no standard anywhere. Excellent so far. Perhaps if you had had occasion you would have defined the good itself as the object of natural desire, or that which is beneficial, or that which is pleasing, or that which strikes the fancy merely. Now too, if you have no objection, as you do not altogether reject definition and you practice it when you please, I should like you to define what pleasure is, for our whole inquiry deals with that.”
Pray, said Torquatus, who is there that does not know what pleasure is, or requires some definition to make it plainer?
Cicero said in response: “I should proclaim myself to be such a person, but that I believe myself to have a thorough notion of pleasure, and a quite stable idea and conception of it in my mind. As it is, however, I allege that Epicurus himself is in the dark about it, and uncertain in his idea of it, and that the very man who often asserts that the meaning which our terms denote ought to be accurately represented, sometimes does not see what this term pleasure indicates.”
Then Torquatus said with a smile: “This is truly an excellent thought, that he who declares pleasure to be supreme among objects of desire and the final and ultimate good knows nothing of the essence and the attributes of the thing itself.”
Nay, said Cicero: “Either Epicurus is ignorant, or else all human beings who are to be found anywhere are ignorant of what pleasure is.”
How so? Torquatus said. And Cicero responded: “Because all pronounce that thing to be pleasure by the reception of which sense is excited and is pervaded by a certain agreeable feeling.”
Cassius: And then they continue on and go into the detail of that further. But it’s been a central part of argument about Epicurean philosophy, all the way back from the time of Cicero — and probably all the way back to Epicurus himself — about the meaning of these key words that are at the heart of the philosophy such as pleasure, such as happiness, such as virtue. You have similar issues regarding discussion of the gods when people understand the word god to mean one thing but Epicurus talks about it in a totally different way. So today what we’re going to do is spend some time talking about the general issues involved in understanding where Epicurus is coming from.
For those who’ve been listening to the podcast over the last several weeks, Cicero and Torquatus have been mostly going back and forth in discussing the issue of happiness — with Cicero contending that happiness must be based on virtue, and in most recent weeks Cicero contending that the happy man cannot be happy in Epicurean philosophy because everyone is faced with pain in their lives, and Epicurus considers pain to be the chief evil. It makes no sense to Cicero that you can describe someone as happy when they are constantly confronted with and dealing with the chief evils of life. Cicero takes a position that happiness should be based on virtue, and from that position where virtue is the center of everything, pleasure and pain are dismissed because virtue transcends everything.
And that takes us to the place where we open the discussion today with the word happiness. We throw that word around as if it came right out of Epicurus’s mouth, but of course Epicurus did not use the word happiness. We need to focus in on what concept we can understand that Epicurus was talking about — whether the word is happiness, whether the word is blessedness, whether the word is joy, whether it’s flourishing, whether it’s a good demon. There are all sorts of possibilities, and the only way for us to get our arms around what’s being discussed is to dig into that and get comfortable. Just as in my story at the beginning of the episode, I finally got comfortable with calling my database a vault, and now I’m calling it a graph, but I know in my mind what we’re talking about is the same thing regardless of the word being used. How do we get a handle on these important words — especially happiness and pleasure — and how they relate to each other? So we’ll have this all wrapped up in like fifteen minutes, right?
Don: Absolutely! Very easy to do — which is probably why Cicero didn’t give Torquatus much of a chance to respond in this section of Book Two! But this is our chance to go through some of these issues. First of all, I want to thank you for inviting me back. I don’t expect to be able to fill Joshua’s shoes, but hopefully we’ll be able to have an interesting conversation here, because this is certainly an interesting topic.
One of the things that came to mind as you were talking is that we have to remember that Epicurus and Cicero never used the words happy or happiness or flourishing. They spoke Greek and Latin, so we’re already working at a disadvantage trying to convey an idea that was in their heads when they used a word into an idea that we have in our heads whenever we use the language that we’re fluent in. So I think that’s one of the things we have to think about off the top.
But one of the things that came to mind when we were talking about having this episode was the whole idea of what does the word happy mean and what does the word happiness mean, even for us who speak English as a first language. At least for me — anybody who’s been on the forum for any length of time knows that I have a hobby horse about the word happy when we were talking about Epicurus being happy on his last day and this sort of thing. To me the word happy — if I say “I am happy” — it’s almost one of those tripping-through-the-daisies, effervescent sorts of feelings, and that’s not the sense that I get that Epicurus was trying to convey whenever he used the words he used for that thing he was feeling at those times. I even have a different sense in my mind whenever it comes to the word happy and the word happiness — happiness to me has sort of a more evaluative feeling to it than an actual feeling or emotion. But I went back to look at the whole field of positive psychology now, and what they define happiness as is subjective well-being — that’s their clinical definition of happiness whenever they do surveys and all that sort of thing. I could sort of wrap my brain around that. And one researcher — I’m not even going to try and pronounce her name — described happiness thus: “Happiness is the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.” If we’re going to use that as a working definition of happiness or being happy, I could probably get behind that.
I’m curious to have the other people on the panel here — what comes to mind whenever you say “I’m happy” or “happiness is how I’m feeling”? Just from a purely subjective point of view, when it comes to the word happy or happiness it is sort of ambiguous for me. It kind of morphs depending on the situation, depending on what is going on, what I’m talking about, what I’m thinking. So the word is really hard to pin down and can be used in different contexts to mean different things. Whenever you say that, it sort of brings to mind the word love — we can say “I love my wife, I love my kids, I love ice cream.” We do not mean the same thing in all those contexts, but having that one word cover so much ground is very similar to how happy and happiness are used in regular everyday speech. People sort of throw that word around and it has such a huge basket of meanings that when you start using it in a philosophical context it’s really hard to know what you actually mean.
One thing I find interesting too about the people we have assembled here today is that I think Martin is the only one who’s fluent in two languages, and I’m curious how he expresses different feelings of happiness or being happy in English and in German — if there’s any sort of tension in his mind when he tries to express that sort of feeling in two different languages, what sort of words come to mind whenever he has a need to express that sort of idea.
Martin: Yeah, the thing is, because I became fluent in English, it’s so easy because the transition is direct from the pre-verbal thought into an expressible thought in a language, so that means I don’t think this in German words first and then translate into English — I express what I think directly in English. I catch myself also dreaming in English sometimes, so that is now automated. But I know from other languages and from the earlier phase of learning English that at first it’s different — I express things in German and then look for an explicit translation in English, and that takes more time and is more ambiguous. Because I think — meanwhile, from reading a lot of English and talking a lot with people — I have a fairly good grasp of what the intuitive meaning of words in English is.
Don: Just as a matter of curiosity, are there different words in German that have different shades of meaning — for instance “I’m happy about this really good thing that happened to me” versus “I’m happy about this other thing” — are there different words in German that would express different shades of meaning of happiness or being happy?
Martin: Yes, yes, yes. So depending on context there will be a different word.
Don: And that’s one of the things I think the context that both Callistheni and Martin have brought up — that context is so important. We see that even in Epicurus’s writings and in Cicero’s writings, where Epicurus will use a word but Cicero will use the same word and try to twist it to his new context and try to put a different shade of meaning on it that I don’t think Epicurus was trying to do. Context is a really important word to keep in mind.
Cassius: So let’s see if we can pick out some of the key ways that Epicurus himself talks about the word happiness. Most people are familiar with the Letter to Menoikeus. One of the places it starts out is: “We must then meditate on the things that make our happiness, seeing that when that is with us we have all, but when it is absent we do all to win it.” And so before we get into pleasure and how it relates to happiness — Don, can you tell us about what Epicurus is saying about happiness in that passage? Epicurus is clearly not saying “we must meditate on the things that make the best ice cream, seeing that when ice cream is with us we have everything, but when it is absent we do all to win it.” There are obviously other shades of meaning that he’s talking about. What do you think?
Don: Yeah, the word that he uses there — and the word that he uses in a number of different places — is eudaimonia, depending on how you want to pronounce it. But that’s the word he seems to use consistently where a lot of people put happiness in an English translation. And we’ve had discussions on the forum trying to use a romanized or transliterated Greek word for a thing that we don’t really have in English — and people gloss over it, “oh yeah, eudaimonia” — people just expect readers to understand what they’re talking about. But trying to get a handle on that is a sticky wicket as well.
My preferred definition is well-being. Aristotle seems to use the term in that way. He also uses it as a synonym for living well. The Greek term is literally translated as “living well,” and the whole idea — I’ve seen it said — is that it’s understood as having success or good fortune or living well. The idea is that it originally referred to the indwelling of a good spirit or a good deity — you can think of it in modern terms as living under the protection of a guardian angel kind of thing. Some people use it as “human flourishing,” which I don’t like, but the whole idea of well-being, living well, being fortunate, being rich in the metaphorical sense, being content, experiencing the little things, being able to just enjoy life — it packs a lot of contextual things into it. That’s the whole idea of well-being, and that’s why I sort of like that definition of “subjective well-being,” because I can see that as at least being adjacent to or pretty close to the whole idea of eudaimonia.
Cassius: Well, one of the contexts packed into it seems to be that Epicurus is saying that whatever it is — if we have it, we have everything; but if we don’t have it, we do everything we can to win it. I’ve always interpreted this as sort of like saying that this is really the best life, really what our goals should be, in a very general sense. Obviously it’s not ice cream. Obviously it’s not a particular experience.
Don: Yeah, it’s not a bullet list of things necessarily. To what extent is it subjective versus objective? Does happiness have the same meaning for everyone? Clearly people choose to live their lives differently, but is there a way to bring the concept together that fits everyone? How do you distill it down to its essence? Does happiness have a central set of premises behind it in the context we’re using it in Epicurean philosophy? I think so. Since pain and pleasure have such a large role in Epicurean philosophy, the whole idea is that your life is suffused with pleasure — you’re enjoying your life, you’re subjectively not struggling — that you have that sort of enjoyment or contentment, but not a Buddhist kind of contentment. I don’t want to go down that road. But things are just good. I do like one of the things that I saw on a Stanford University site, where they were saying the term eudaimonia plays an evaluative role — that it’s more of an evaluation of your situation than simply a description of your state of mind or a feeling or an emotion. So it’s more broad than just saying it’s an emotion. You evaluate your life — that you have a eudaimonic life — things are going well, you feel fortunate, you feel like things are going good. That’s the sense that I get from that word.
Cassius: Okay, well I’m going to take that we’ve established that eudaimonia is discussed in Epicurean philosophy as sort of a placeholder or concept that describes the goal of your life that you wish to achieve. It’s not a particular set of experiences in the sense of ice cream or cake or candy, but it is a summary term that describes the goal that we’re after.
Don: Yeah, I would go with that.
Cassius: And it seems that that’s the level at which Cicero and the opponents of Epicurus are battling him. They seem to sort of agree that whether we use the word eudaimonia, or in English blessedness or happiness or whatever word we’re going to put in this box, this word is sort of the in-game summary — what we’re going to use as the goal of our lives. Which helps us a little bit by discussing that there is a way to consider our lives having a goal, but leads to all sorts of questions about the specifics of what this word really means and how you can really describe it.
Defining words can get to be a circular game — happiness is pleasure, pleasure is happiness — you end up at the same place where you started. If you don’t understand what the words mean — if you don’t have a clear conception, as Epicurus emphasizes in the Letter to Herodotus — then you just go on defining things infinitely without ever having any understanding of what you’ve done.
Don: Which I think brings you back to that section in Menoikeus that you had talked about — that if you have that, if you have that sense of contentment, that your life is going well, that you’re enjoying your life, you really do have everything then, and you’ll do anything to get that sense of enjoyment and contentment and taking pleasure in life.
Cassius: Right. And so we’ve been seeing Cicero try to hammer away at Torquatus and Epicurus, coming at the question of happiness by saying: Epicurus, you are wrong to define happiness in terms of pleasure and pain. This is where we were last week. Basically: Torquatus and Epicurus, as long as you insist on considering happiness in terms of pleasure and pain, you’re never going to make any sense, you’re never going to have a legitimate philosophy — because what you should realize is that there are things about happiness totally different from pleasure and pain. And that’s where Epicurus, you fail to understand that the real heart of happiness is virtue.
And so a lot of these games going back and forth — not only between Cicero and Torquatus but basically between the Epicureans and the Stoics, even today — all of these philosophical issues get back to the question of: is happiness tied to pleasure and pain, or is happiness tied to virtue, or is there some kind of religious connotation to happiness that takes precedence over all the rest?
As we go forward, there are many examples from the text that show this linkage. Torquatus, previously in Book One, Section 54, had said:
“If then even the glory of the virtues, on which all the other philosophers love to expatiate so eloquently, has in its last resort no meaning unless it be based on pleasure, whereas pleasure is the only thing that is intrinsically attractive and alluring, it cannot be doubted that pleasure is the one supreme and final good and that a life of happiness is nothing else than a life of pleasure.”
Then another fragment from Diogenes of Oinoanda that we quote all the time says this:
“I shall discuss folly shortly, the virtues and pleasure now. If, gentlemen, the pointed issue between these people and us involved inquiry into what is the means of happiness, and they wanted to say ‘the virtues’ — which would actually be true — it would be unnecessary to take any other step than to agree with them about this, without more ado. But since, as I say, the issue is not what is the means of happiness, but what is happiness and what is the ultimate goal of our nature, I say both now and always, shouting out loudly to all Greeks and non-Greeks, that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life, while the virtues — which are inopportunely messed about by these people, being transferred from the place of the means to that of the end — are in no way an end but the means to the end. Let us therefore now state that this is true, making it our starting point.”
So those examples and many others in Epicurean texts link pleasure directly to happiness and make it the main aspect of happiness. Where do we go once we’ve decided that happiness is a good word to use to describe our goal? How do we give greater clarity to happiness by linking it to one of these other terms?
Don: Just for the record, Diogenes of Oinoanda does use the word eudaimonia in his inscription there, so we’re right back to where we were defining that term. So I think that’s a good place to go. I mean, if you look at it in light of Epicurus’s philosophy, there is only pleasure and pain. And if you want to live a good life, you want to have a preponderance of pleasure in your life as opposed to a preponderance of pain. I think it comes down to being as simple as that.
Cassius: That’s an excellent place to go to next, because that’s one of those areas that I think needs a lot of stress. Torquatus reports that Epicurus said: what does nature give us other than pleasure and pain? Diogenes Laertius has recorded that Epicurus said the feelings are two — pleasure and pain — and there’s much discussion about how there’s no middle ground between pleasure and pain, no third option. So one of the major points of this discussion today is that from Epicurus’s point of view — and we can decide whether we agree with that or not — everything resolves down into either pleasure or pain, and all feelings, everything that you experience, resolves itself down into one of those two categories.
Don: I bet we agree, but that’s okay.
Cassius: Yeah, absolutely. I think we will agree too. And as Principal Doctrine 3 says: “Wherever pleasure is present, as long as it is there, there is neither pain of body, nor of mind, nor of both at once.”
Which seems to me to be stressing this same point — you’ve got a very logical, clear, bright-line breakdown between pleasure and pain. Your feeling is either pleasure or pain. Within the same feeling, they’re not some mixture or some third quality. Now, as we discuss often as well, you can have different things going on in your life at the same time, so you can be experiencing both pain in one part of your experience and pleasure in another. But when you drill down to a particular part of your experience where you’re feeling something, it’s either pleasure or pain.
And that brings us back to what Cicero talks about in Section 32 — he was subject to the greatest possible evil, was not happy so long as he remained subject to it, whereas the wise man always is happy, though he is at times subject to pain. Pain, therefore, is not the greatest possible evil.
Don: Just because you experience pain doesn’t mean that you aren’t also living an enjoyable life. I think that this goes back to Epicurus’s Letter to Menoikeus where it says: because pleasure is the fundamental inborn good, this is why not every pleasure is seized and we pass by many pleasures when greater unpleasant things would result for us as a result. And we think many pains better than pleasures wherever greater pleasure were to follow for a longer time by patiently abiding the pain.
So it’s the whole idea that Cicero tries to make this dichotomy — if you have pain in your life, it can’t be about pain and pleasure, it has to be about virtue. And I think it’s just fundamentally backwards, because the whole thing I keep coming back to with Cicero is that the reason he wants to practice virtue is because it feels good, because it gives him pleasure to act virtuously. And he just always leaves that out. It’s so frustrating.
We had a discussion online about the sense of gratitude we should have for Cicero passing these things on to us. But I mentioned to Cassius before we started recording today that Cicero would be absolutely horrified that we’re using his text to actually try and resurrect a sense of Epicurean philosophy in the modern day. And I take some comfort in that.
Cassius: And there on the very subject we’re discussing right now is an example of that. Because it’s even more clear in Torquatus, which Cicero has thankfully preserved for us, where in Section 10 of Book One Torquatus goes into the same question at much more length and says:
“Surely no one recoils from or dislikes or avoids pleasure in itself because it is pleasure, but because pains come upon those who do not know how to follow pleasure rationally. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or wishes to win pain on its own account merely because it is pain, but rather because circumstances sometimes occur which compel him to seek some great pleasure at the cost of exertion and pain.”
So in Torquatus, you see both sides of it. You choose pain not only to avoid worse pain, but you can sometimes choose pain in order to obtain pleasure. You’re not just simply avoiding pain all the time in every situation because it’s pain, but because the result the choice brings is productive of pleasure.
Don: Yeah, yeah. And I think that that’s where that whole idea of the evaluative nature of eudaimonia comes in — that you’re looking at a broad spectrum of experiences and saying, I experienced some pain here and some pain there, but overall looking at it, I’m doing pretty well, I feel pretty good about my life. That’s where I think that idea of evaluation and looking at the long view or the overview or the summary comes in whenever we’re talking about well-being.
Cassius: Right. And let’s also be sure to include one of the best examples of this analysis process, which would be the final days of Epicurus, where we have a pretty good text — it seems — from Diogenes Laertius. At the end of his life Epicurus was experiencing extreme pain while he was going through his kidney disease, and yet he was considering himself to be — we’ll have to decide what word to use — happy, eudaimonic, whatever. And I’ll turn it over to Don to explain that in more detail.
Diogenes Laertius had also recorded that Epicurus had said that the wise man can consider himself to be happy even when he’s on the rack or under torture. So clearly there’s a point here to be made that whatever words you want to use to describe your goal — whether it’s happiness or flourishing, whatever — from the Epicurean perspective, you can be happy, you can be flourishing, even though you are also at the same time experiencing pain. And so therefore you’re not guiding your life with a North Star of simply avoiding pain at every moment. Your North Star is to obtain this goal of life, which understandably, as a human being, is going to include some pain. But let’s talk for a minute, Don, about Epicurus’s final days.
Don: Yeah. I find it interesting that the very first word there that he uses to describe the day is makarion, which is the same word that’s used to describe the gods in Principal Doctrine 1 — makarios. And that word is interesting too because in Latin it’s usually translated as beatus, which is the word that Cicero uses a lot. And that whole idea of blessedness and happiness is an interesting one, because again it has that sense of being rich in a metaphorical sense — that you feel that you’re wealthy, that your life is full, that your life is rich. That’s the sense that I get from that word.
And it’s also, as a matter of trivia, that’s where we get the Beatitudes. The first word in all those things in the Bible where Jesus is talking is makarios — “blessed are this” and “blessed are that.” That’s the same word in Greek that’s used in Principal Doctrine 1 and here in Epicurus’s letter to Idomeneus. And it’s interesting there.
Going back into this in getting ready for this episode, I found it interesting that Epicurus also uses the word chairon, where it says “gladness of mind that I set against these experiences.” That is actually a form of the word used in the kinetic pleasures — the catastematic and kinetic pleasures, which we don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. But I think it’s interesting that Epicurus uses a word directly related to those kinetic pleasures that he talks about. So he’s using that kinetic pleasure on his last day.
And the other word I really found interesting in digging back into the Greek here was the word that in the English translation says “I set above them all the gladness of mind at the memory of our past conversations.” But the word that’s used there doesn’t necessarily mean “set above” or that sort of thing. The sense is to line up in a road, to stand in array against, to hold one’s ground against, or to place side by side in a battle line. What he’s doing is he’s using that enjoyment of the memory of these past philosophical discussions, these past times with his friends — he’s using those to do battle against the pain of this horrible condition that he’s going through.
And I like that idea better than thinking that he’s conquered this and doesn’t feel the pain. A lot of the times it seems to me that people try to say that Epicurus wasn’t feeling any pain on his last day because he was using his memory — that doesn’t make any sense. What he’s saying is: I’m in terrible pain, I know I’m going to die, but I’m doing battle against that pain with all these pleasant memories I have. I feel I’ve lived my life well. I’m satisfied with the way things have turned out. I’m happy for all the friends I’ve made and the people that are around me taking care of me right now. So that’s what I think he’s doing there on his last day in that letter.
Cassius: When you refer to battle, Don, it reminds me of the way that Torquatus is explaining a lot of his argument to Cicero in terms of his own ancestors — and the battle of his ancestor Torquatus Manlius pulling the necklace from his foe and doing different things in battle. In fact, the whole of Book Two seems to be a lot of comparisons about different people in different battles of different types. Cicero himself keeps talking about how his own examples of virtue are set against the problems they were experiencing in their battles — the memory of the triumphs they’d had in the past or the accomplishments in saving Rome and so forth.
So that’s a very interesting way of looking at all this — that you’re not eliminating these things from your experience. Because Diogenes Laertius says Epicurus says the wise man feels his emotions more deeply than other people do. You’re not suppressing these things or considering yourself to be indifferent to them the way the Stoics might do. You understand that you’re experiencing them, but you’re also understanding these other things that make these pains and exertions worthwhile.
Don: Right, worthwhile is a really good word there. I think that’s a good way to put it.
Cassius: Okay. Well, while we’re on this topic, it’s probably a good moment to go back to the fact that what we’re saying, I think, is that Epicurus is saying that the happy person — or whatever words you want to use — is going to be experiencing some pain along the way, or at that particular moment can consider himself to be happy even though some part of his experience, as Epicurus’s last day shows, involves pain.
Well, the other side of that story is that we’re not just talking in Epicurean philosophy about happiness versus pain — we’re talking about pleasure versus pain. So let’s get back for a moment to this issue of what the word pleasure means in Epicurean philosophy, and how it can then be brought into the concept of happiness in a way that makes sense. Because one of the things stressed throughout Book Two and Book One of On Ends is that Epicurus has a different definition of pleasure than most people will immediately think of. Cicero and Torquatus go back and forth that everybody understands that stimulations of the senses — your ice cream, your cake, your sex, drugs, and rock and roll — that those things are pleasurable. But what Epicurus is saying is that we should understand the word pleasure to mean not only those stimulations of the senses but also other things.
And as we’ve said already in this episode, there are only two feelings: pleasure and pain. So if something is not painful, then from that perspective it is pleasurable. And that leaves a wide variation of experience in human life when you start talking about things that are not painful. That’s an awful lot of things to talk about.
In Torquatus, thankfully, Cicero has preserved for us all sorts of argument about this — you can start talking about your hand in its normal state if you’re debating with Chrysippus, or you can talk about comparing the conditions of a host who’s pouring wine to a guest who’s drinking that wine, or you can just simply go to the argument itself where Cicero says: “Torquatus, don’t you understand that there are thousands of people in the world who are not experiencing either pleasure or pain?” And Torquatus says: no, absolutely — if you’re not experiencing pain, you’re experiencing pleasure. And in fact Torquatus regularly ups the ante, just like Epicurus does, and says: “Cicero, if you’re telling me that that person over there is experiencing no pain, then I’m telling you that he’s experiencing pleasure — and not only just pleasure, but the greatest pleasure. Because you’ve told me he’s experiencing no pain, so how can his life be any better than that?”
So this argument going on in Book Two gives us a lot of additional detail beyond the Letter to Menoikeus and beyond the few texts we do have preserved in Diogenes Laertius. So the word pleasure — after having listened to me rattle on about it for a few minutes — how do you tell somebody who says: “Hey, I am not a professor, I don’t intend to spend my life teaching philosophy. I need a practical, common sense understanding of how I should look at this word pleasure. I understand you’re saying it’s not just sex, drugs, and rock and roll. How should I think about pleasure on a day-to-day basis?”
Don: Well, I think you sort of hit the nail on the head whenever you said, as a human mortal being, you can only experience either pleasure or pain. You can also think about it — if you want to try and make it a little bit more amenable — you could say you can only feel things that are positive or negative, things that promote your growth or make your growth not possible. The words that Epicurus decided to use were pleasure and pain.
The more you think about it, the more it just seems to make sense that the only time you’re not feeling anything is whenever you’re dead. You’re always feeling something, and it’s either going to be good, positive, pleasurable — or it’s going to be painful, negative, not helping your growth. So there can really only be two sorts of things that you can experience.
And Cicero is just so maddening at times, because you know he’s a smart guy and you know that he’s just being willfully obtuse sometimes, or willfully trying to pull back the definitions. He obviously knows exactly what he’s saying. He’s a really intelligent person, fluent in rhetoric and all these sorts of things. And it’s just maddening sometimes to see him just clutch his pearls and go, “Oh, you can’t mean this. Oh, my heavens.” It’s just — anyway, that’s my take on that.
Cassius: You mentioned in that last response the idea of being dead as the only time you don’t experience one of these two feelings. I want to put a pin on that for just a moment and come back to it, because another of the things we’ve been talking about a lot in recent episodes we’ve summarized by going to a particular quote from Norman DeWitt in his Epicurus and His Philosophy, page 240. Let me remind people of that.
DeWitt said: “The extension of the name of pleasure to this normal state of being was the major innovation of the new hedonism. It was in the negative form — freedom from pain of body and distress of mind — that it drew the most persistent and vigorous condemnation from adversaries. The contention was that the application of the name of pleasure to this state was unjustified on the ground that two different things were thereby being denominated by one name. Cicero made a great to-do over this argument, but it’s really superficial and captious. The fact that the name of pleasure was not customarily applied to the normal or static state did not alter the fact that the name ought to be applied to it, nor that reason justified the application, nor that human beings would be the happier for so reasoning and believing.”
And the reason I wanted to put a pin on the idea of death is we probably could talk for a few minutes to address the concern that somebody might have: “Okay guys, so now you’re telling me that pleasure means the same thing as my lying on the floor staring at the ceiling? I’m not in pain when I’m doing that. Am I supposed to consider that to be pleasure? I don’t think I can buy that.”
And so what we ought to discuss is: is there any reason for us to consider that this state that Cicero wants to label as neutral or in the middle is actually pleasurable? And one way, at least in my personal life, I justify that — is because in terms of death versus life, from an Epicurean point of view, I’m convinced that until my body came together, my soul did not exist. For an eternity in time before I was born, I did not exist. For an eternity in time after I die, there is no immortal soul — I will not exist for an eternity after I die, just like before I was born. And so the brief span of life between when we’re born and when we die is all that we have, and ought to be something that we value and use the best possible way.
If we’re not in some specific pain that is causing us a tremendous amount of difficulty, then that brief existence of life between birth and death is something valuable and precious to be used properly and productively and pleasurably and happily and eudaimonically — or whatever other words you want to describe it. But it is justified and reasonable to consider your life to be pleasurable and happy unless you’re in some terrible pain. Epicurus said that it’s a very poor man who has lots of reasons for ending his own life. And from that perspective, just being alive in your body or your mind and not in pain is a pleasure from Epicurus’s viewpoint. Would you agree with that, Don?
Don: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah — I’d agree. I think that’s well put.
Cassius: Well, not only agree with it but expand on it if you can!
Don: It’s like those one-word answers in interviews! No, no — I think you’re spot on. I think that having that sort of perspective on your life — it goes back to those words like fortunate, and that you feel rich, and it comes down to that you’re able to experience. I mean, the fact that we exist at all is astronomically improbable, and yet here we are. And to not take advantage of that and to really appreciate what you have is such a waste. It’s kind of sad.
Cassius: Yes. And while you’re talking about appreciating what we have, let’s go ahead and deal with the issue of comparing and balancing — or battling — mental pain and pleasures against physical pain and pleasures. Because one of Cicero’s grounds of attack is that oh, Epicurus said that the only thing that’s important is the body, and all of your pains and pleasures come from the body. In fact, Cicero starts out in Book One of On Ends by making the comment that Epicurus never said that literature and art and poetry and all of these other things in life are pleasurable, because what he focused on was the pleasures of the body. And just recently Cicero was saying to Torquatus: “Don’t try to tell me that when you think, Torquatus, of your country house and these other beautiful things in life — don’t try to tell me that that’s pleasure, because those aren’t connected with the body.”
Now let’s talk for a few minutes about the relationship between mental and bodily experiences from Epicurus’s point of view.
Don: Yeah, that’s where Cicero’s at his most maddening — he keeps limiting that definition just for his own purposes, when Epicurus clearly says you can experience pleasure and you can experience pain. And Cicero continuously goes back to the stimulative pleasures of the moment, which I think is a very Cyrenaic definition of pleasure. And that limited definition is exactly what Epicurus spoke against and wrote against — he had that expansive definition of pleasure, and Cicero just continuously — it’s like, no, no, it’s just sex, drugs, and rock and roll, that’s the only thing we can call pleasure, that’s it. And it’s just so frustrating to see him go back to this again and again.
Cassius: Yeah, there are definitely texts which say that Epicurus is linking everything back to the body. But there you have to remember that that’s exactly what the Epicureans do — they link everything back to the body, right, because that’s all we have.
Don: Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. That’s our material existence — that’s all that we have. There is no dichotomy, there is no “I think therefore I am” dichotomy in Epicurean philosophy. Everything is physical, everything is related to the body. The mind is part of the body, but it’s obviously its own thing — just like you have a hand and you have feet and you have a nose and you have a mind. It’s a part of your total existence, and each thing functions in its own way. So the fact that it’s related to “the body” is almost like — you know, duh — that’s all we have to work with. But his idea that therefore that only means it’s sex, drugs, and rock and roll is just demonstrably false within the philosophy and even just within common sense. And it’s just that thing that he keeps harping on all the time.
And he has no excuse for that, because Torquatus had explained to him in Book One, right around Section 56, that: “By this time, so much at least is plain — that the intensest pleasure, or the intensest annoyance, felt in the mind exerts more influence on the happiness or wretchedness of life than either feeling when present for an equal space of time in the body.”
So I don’t think Epicurus was saying that pleasures of the mind are generically or categorically or intrinsically more important than pleasures of the body. But he’s saying that there’s a context to everything, and that the most intense pleasure of the mind is going to exert more influence on your happiness than the most intense pain of the body. And one of the ways I’ve thought about that is that whenever you have something that you’re worried about or anxious about, you can think about that every waking moment — it’s always sitting there nagging at your brain and coloring all of your experiences. Whereas if you have some sort of pain in your foot or a paper cut or something like that, it’s of the moment. Those mental pains and griefs — even grief, if you lose a loved one — you’re always thinking about them, and that’s always there in the background. And I think that’s one of the reasons why he makes that distinction between physical and mental pains and pleasures. For that matter, if you’re looking forward to something, if you have the anticipation of a future pleasure, you can keep that in the back of your mind all the time.
Cassius: Yep. And in linking some of these concepts together about how there are only two feelings — pleasure and pain — right after what I just quoted from Torquatus a moment ago, he says: “We refuse to believe, however, that when pleasure is removed, grief instantly ensues, excepting when perchance pain has taken the place of the pleasure. But we think on the contrary that we experience joy on the passing away of pains, even though none of that kind of pleasure which stirs the senses has taken their place.”
And from this it may be understood how great a pleasure it is to be without pain. Again linking all this together — if you’ve got a particular pain and you get rid of that pain, you’re not just in some undefined neutral state of nothingness, you’re in pleasure. Because your default state of life when you’re without pain is pleasure.
So that, I think, presents a stumbling block to some people who will think about absence of pain as if Epicurus is describing something really hard to understand — and we don’t know what this third state is, but maybe if we had a time machine we could go back two thousand years and we could see some drug that Epicurus is taking or some incantation, and we’d really understand what this transcendent condition was. But I don’t think any of that’s the case. Epicurus is just saying: there are only two feelings; when you don’t have pain you have pleasure; and it’s up to you to decide whether the part of the body, whether the duration of that pleasure, whether the intensity of that pleasure is what you want to pursue or not. But from a philosophical, common sense point of view — from the point of view where your life itself when you’re not in pain is in pleasure — you’re in pleasure when you don’t have pain.
Don: I mean, you could take some absurd examples. If you didn’t want to use the words day and night you could say day and not-day. There are any number of things that are opposed to each other — wet and not-wet — if you want to take it to an absurd limit. But that’s sort of what Epicurus has done in expanding both categories. I mean, if you ask somebody “are you in pain?” it’s like, “well, you know, not really… well, now that you mentioned it, my foot’s asleep.” It’s a wide spectrum of both experiences — both pleasure and pain. But to see Cicero limit that definition is just, as I said, maddening.
Cassius: Well, every viewpoint ultimately has to have justification or evidence and reasoning to support it. And I think what Epicurus is doing here does come back to this idea that Epicurean philosophy is based on its physics and its canonics and its epistemology. From your assessment of the universe, you really have to come to conclusions about all these things. In Epicurean philosophy you do not conclude that there’s a supernatural being that is beckoning you to come to heaven or threatening to send you to hell, so you’re not going to use those considerations to decide what happiness means. And in Epicurean philosophy there is no such thing as an ideal form floating in some part of the universe that everybody can put their objective definition to and understand it.
So this idea of virtue being the anchor to which you can attach everything — which is what Cicero and Aristotle and Plato and the Stoics and so forth are doing — that just falls to the ground, because there is no objective standard of virtue that you can come back to. But in Epicurean philosophy, what does nature give us? It doesn’t give us virtue. It doesn’t give us a divine commandment to go to heaven or avoid hell. Nature gives us pleasure and pain. And when you look at it logically, when you look at it reasonably, when you look at it from common experience — everybody has pleasure and pain from nature. And Epicurus is simply saying: I might wish that there was eternal life in heaven, I might wish that there were ideal forms telling me what to do every moment — but that’s just not the way it is. The way things are, everything is built upon pleasure and pain for the way you prudently and rationally live your life.
Don: Exactly. And the thing that maddens me too about Cicero and the Stoics and all those philosophical schools bringing up virtue, virtue, virtue — I mean, the reason that they practice virtue is because it makes them feel good. It makes them feel good to be virtuous. And there’s no way they ever say that, but I’m like — that’s the only reason that you’re doing it, that’s your overarching reason for doing that. And again, that’s what makes it the summum bonum — if you keep asking why you do something, you’re going to eventually end up at “because I like it, because it makes me feel good.” They refuse to admit that. There’s no basis for virtue other than their assertions, and they won’t admit it. They’re committed to that position.
Cassius: Right. You’re not going to change their minds. Torquatus is not going to change Cicero’s mind. People in life can make up their own minds — they have to make up their own minds and decide what they’re going to do, because that’s just the way it is. Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion. But that’s what we’re doing, I think, in Epicurean philosophy and on the podcast — we’re trying to bring these questions to people’s attention so that you can make up your own mind about which is right and which is wrong. But don’t go looking for Cicero’s final will where he recants this position. Don’t go looking for everyone to agree with you, because these are very important emotional issues and you yourself have to make up your own mind as to which one you believe to be true. You’re going to spend that time from birth to death and you’re really never going to have a way to know the answer other than through your own experience and your own observations and your own assessment of what’s true and false.
Don: Well put.
Cassius: Okay, well, we’ve had a good episode today. Don has more than lived up to our expectations for him being here.
Don: I’m glad!
Cassius: Let’s go ahead and take closing comments and start to bring the episode to a conclusion. Martin, any thoughts for the day?
Martin: I have nothing to add. Thanks.
Cassius: All right, thank you, Martin. Callistheni, your thoughts?
Callistheni: I really enjoyed today’s episode, and especially going over the word eudaimonia and the meaning of that — that has been very helpful for me. I guess I’ve kind of read this on the forum before, like quick definitions — for example, how it’s something to do with a good spirit — but somehow today it kind of really clicked for me. For example, I wrote down in my notes today “living under a good spirit,” and then it kind of came to me some more ideas about that. Because you could say it’s like a good attitude, a good mood, upbeat — I mean, that’s maybe going a little bit further than what anybody else has come to define eudaimonia, but —
Cassius: No, no — I actually like that! I like that.
Callistheni: Oh, okay, good! So in some ways I’ve always kind of been against using Greek words when you could — here we are in an English-speaking place, let’s just use English words and not get caught up in Greek. I know other people maybe like the Greek more than I do. But I’m suddenly now realizing how it can hold meaning in a different word than the word happiness. It’s almost like you have to spend a little bit of time with it, whereas forever, happiness will have whatever connotation our culture — our Western culture — has given it. It’s been kind of taken over even by advertising. So it’s kind of a tainted word in that respect, because people try to sell you products by telling you you’ll be happier, it’ll make you happy if you buy this. So using the word eudaimonia really now makes sense to me for understanding Epicurean philosophy better. So yeah, thank you.
Cassius: Great, Callistheni. I think you really went in a good direction there. Because whenever you’re talking about advertisers using the word happy and happiness, using eudaimonia sorts of breaks that link and gives you a fresh opportunity to think about what it actually means — a different context that’s free from all that baggage. And I think the way you put that is really good. Okay, Don, what are your closing thoughts for today?
Don: This was a lot of fun. I hope that everybody enjoys listening to the podcast. You mentioned briefly at the beginning of this episode that we’re recording this on the day before the total eclipse happening in the United States. And I think that from a metaphorical sense — I like the idea of memorializing this episode in light of the eclipse — as in: the Epicurean school was shining brightly for quite some time, and then it got eclipsed for a long time, and hopefully we are on the leading edge of the sun coming back out. So that’s my metaphorical take on the eclipse and the Epicurean school.
Cassius: That’s a great analogy, and it’ll be easy to remember because it’s Episode 222 — so in the future if we want to come back to it, we’ll just have to remember the single number two.
Let me close by calling attention back to something that Epicurus said in the Letter to Herodotus that I think summarizes what we’re doing here and is a good way to close. He said right at the beginning of his letter:
“But those who have also made considerable progress in the survey of the main principles ought to bear in mind the scheme of the whole system set forth in its essentials, for we have frequent need of the general view, but not so often of the detailed exposition. Indeed, it is necessary to go back on the main principles and constantly fix in one’s memory enough to give one the most essential comprehension of the truth. And in fact the accurate knowledge of the details will be fully discovered if the general principles in the various departments are thoroughly grasped and borne in mind. For even in the case of one who is fully initiated, the most essential feature in all accurate knowledge is the capacity to make a rapid use of observation and mental apprehension, and this can be done if everything is summed up in elementary principles and formulae, for it is not possible for anyone to abbreviate the complete course through the whole system if he cannot embrace in his own mind by means of short formulae all that might be set out with accuracy and detail.”
Wherefore since the method I’ve described is valuable to all those who are accustomed to the investigation of nature, I urge upon others the constant occupation in the investigation of nature, and I find my own peace chiefly in a life so occupied. And this is the last thing he says: “First of all, Herodotus, we must grasp the ideas attached to words in order that we may be able to refer to them and so to judge the inferences of opinion or problems of investigation or reflection, so that we may not either leave everything uncertain and go on explaining to infinity, or use words devoid of meaning.”
So that’s what we’ve been talking about today. We want practical results from this. We don’t want to leave everything uncertain, we don’t want to go on explaining things to infinity, and we don’t want to use words devoid of meaning. And the only way to do that and avoid it is to study these things and talk about them with other people. And that’s the cue to say, as we say every week — if you’re interested in discussing these issues further with us, please join us on the EpicureanFriends Forum. Thanks again for your time — we’ll be back next week. See you then!